Laguna Hills forced to cancel City Council election due to lack of candidates

LAGUNA HILLS – Residents will have three fewer boxes to check this year on their Nov. 4 election ballot.

Three seats were up for grabs on the City Council, but only three people filed to run by deadline.

City officials voted to cancel the unnecessary race at an Aug. 20 special meeting, saving the city about $21,000.

Incumbent officials Barbara Kogerman and Melody Carruth, whose terms are set to expire this year, and Don Sedgwick, a longtime Saddleback Valley Unified School District board trustee, were appointed to four-year terms.

This is the third time since the city’s 1991 incorporation that Laguna Hills has canceled a municipal election because of a dearth of candidates, City Clerk Peggy Johns said.

Kogerman said that while she was relieved not to have to go through a campaign, “canceling the election because of a lack of enough qualified candidates is a result of not providing our citizens more opportunity to get involved in city governance.”

She hopes to convince her colleagues to appoint a Planning Commission to get residents involved in city operations and provide a back bench of potential candidates, she said.

If Kogerman’s plan doesn’t find backers – her 2013 proposal to start such a commission was shot down after city staffers estimated the cost would run to $100,000 annually – she said the next best thing would be starting a Leadership Academy program.

Sedgwick said he decided not to run for another term on the school board after 18 years to give someone else a chance to serve the school system.

Also relieved at not having to campaign, Sedgwick said he was unsure why the city fielded so few candidates, or why the people who pulled nomination papers did not file them.

“I would love to say that they did not file due to their confidence in my ability to serve the city’s residents,” he said, “but I never had the opportunity to speak with any of them, so I do not know why they chose not to file.”

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